When a person enters a health system, he or she will frequently come in contact with dozens of providers, clinicians, staff members and other patients or persons during the course of care. Healthcare providers often have a need to determine, during this course of care, the care the person has received and who provided that care. In the healthcare industry, this information can be recorded on various forms manually, or can be housed within a computerized clinical information system. Various people within the healthcare system may also need to determine which person has the most relevant information about a particular patient. However, it may be difficult to determine “who knows the patient best.” Such information can be gleaned by going through records individually, getting detail about each encounter, and making an estimation of who to contact. However, this process is time consuming, even in an electronic system, and may yield information that ultimately is useless. For example, knowing that a particular nurse is most familiar with a patient may not help solve the immediate need if that nurse is not present or otherwise available.
Likewise, infection control issues may arise in a healthcare setting. In such situations, it is important to identify the persons and resources (rooms, equipment, etc.) that have been exposed to a particular patient. It is also important to know who has subsequently come into contact with those individuals or resources who were exposed to the patient, and the individuals and resources who contacted those individuals and resources exposed to the patient. Again, the information can often be recreated from manual or electronic records, but the process is time consuming and inefficient.
There exists, therefore, a need to quickly and efficiently obtain this kind of information. The information that is needed should also be displayed in a manner that quickly conveys the most relevant information. In addition, it would be advantageous if the display is dynamic and interactive. Most traditional visualizations in the healthcare setting show retrospective views of data specifically stored about the person of interest, often missing the value of dynamic information about relationships that are relevant to the person. However, these visualizations (and the tools associated with these visualizations) do not facilitate real-time, interactive application management during the care process.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient system and method for determining the relationship between an entity of interest and the various entities that have had contact with that entity, such as a clinical relationship between a patient and those that have contact with the patient. There is also a need for a system and method for displaying clinical relationship information that allows a user to perform a variety of functions such as viewing and analyzing relationships, initiating collaborative work, and carrying out infection control.